Your heating choice matters to wildlife, soil, and water quality

by Jeff Rubin | August 6, 2018

Your heating choice matters to wildlife, soil, and water quality

forest habitatThe best way for us to protect Vermont’s forests from development is to rebuild the market for pulp wood. Most of Vermont’s forests are not protected and about a third are in current use. That means the forest are required to be harvested which keeps them healthy, and continues Vermont’s working landscape heritage. 70% of the harvest cannot be used for building lumber. It is this low-grade, pulpwood that drives sustainable forestry operations.

Rebuilding a lost market

Back in the olden days, before we started doing everything on our phones, there was a healthy market for pulp wood making paper. Since 2009, the New England market for pulpwood lost 2.1 million tons of capacity due to the closing of the region’s paper mills.

The average age of the Vermont land-holder is 70-something and in most cases there is no succession plan to protect forests from the lure of quick profits from development. We only have a short window of time to rebuild the market for pulpwood. So, what does this have to do with wood pellet boilers and furnaces?

We have the solution

The new generation of hands-free, clean-heat wood pellet boilers and furnaces are the key to rebuilding the pulpwood market and keeping Vermont’s forests healthy. Renewable wood pellet heating fuel is low cost, price stable, and keeps $.78 of every heating dollar in our region. Wood pellet central heating supports local jobs and sustainable forests in the Northeast.  And instead of sending our dollars to Big Oil, we reduce greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas heating systems.

Today in Vermont we have a fully-operational wood pellet central heating industry as convenient as oil or gas heating. Now it is up to us to implement these sustainable solutions in our homes. Want to learn more? Check out wood pellet heating explained and sustainable forestry.

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.